"Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you somebody who has never achieved much"
About this Quote
The intent is practical and slightly mischievous: stop fetishizing flawlessness. Collins isn’t offering a therapeutic mantra so much as a social read. People who brag about being mistake-free are often people who haven’t risked anything that could dent their image. The subtext is about reputations as much as regrets. In an industry like acting, where public narratives are constantly edited for palatability, “mistakes” can mean anything from a bad role to a messy tabloid chapter to a career gamble that didn’t land. Collins, a celebrity who’s had to live with her choices in public, is implicitly defending the audacity to be seen trying.
It also smuggles in a quiet critique of respectability culture: the kind that rewards caution, punishes experimentation, and calls it “professionalism.” By equating error with ambition, she flips the moral valence. Mistakes become proof of movement, of appetite, of a life lived at full volume. The punch isn’t that failure is good; it’s that the absence of failure is often the absence of stakes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Collins, Joan. (2026, January 16). Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you somebody who has never achieved much. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/show-me-a-person-who-has-never-made-a-mistake-and-99461/
Chicago Style
Collins, Joan. "Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you somebody who has never achieved much." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/show-me-a-person-who-has-never-made-a-mistake-and-99461/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you somebody who has never achieved much." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/show-me-a-person-who-has-never-made-a-mistake-and-99461/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.









